Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi,

What about words including clitics? e.g.

> > it's, I'm,
> > he's got. Are they one word or two?
>
> Those are not clitics.  They're contractions, and  English usage still
> understands them as
> basically elisions of two words into one phonetic string.
>
>
I don't know if you realise it but you just gave a pretty good definition of
clitics after claiming they weren't clitics. I'm not sure what you mean by
'one phonetic string'. Both I'm and I am are continuous sequences in a
speech signal. It is only our perception (guided by whatever
psycholinguistic principles) that has the word divisions.


>
> The question is far too dependent on languages like English that do things
> very differently
> than semitic languages did/do.  I have argued  in print that the
> wa+doubling of the wayyiqtol
> is a specified grammatical formative, roughly equivalent to a "morph" in
> your terminology,
> and as such it's not really possible to speak of the "meaning" of the yomer
> part of wayyomer
> because the wa+doubling is part of the word, and yomer by itself is a
> different form.  We
> know from usage that there's a big difference between yiqtol, "yomer" and
> wayyiqtol,
> "wayyomer."  Hence it's not possible to answer most of your questions.
>
>
Seems to me like you've answered it quite well. You've stated a concrete
position that the difference in meaning between yomer and wayyomer is more
than just a simple conjunction. Could you back it up with examples to show
your case?

James Christian

Dave Washburn
>
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
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